Sceptically passionate on Enterprise Mobility, AutoID, WLANs, OSes and other technical stuff I happen to work with

Category: Opinion

Those of you who follow me on LinkedIn may have noticed that I have a new workplace, which comes with a Digital Workspace.

This means less wireless, but even more on Enterprise Mobility, EMMs, mobile security Android, iOS, Windows 10 and MacOS (did you know that both MS and Apple made their desktop OSes manageable by EMM ?)

If you are not following me in LinkedIn and Twitter, you are probably missing 90% of the stuff! So, please consider (or save yourself lots of noise and unsubscribe – fair enough 😉 )

Why VMware/AirWatch, why EMM?

This is going to be a long-ish and exalted neophyte read, purely optional.

Given the events in the last two years, I think that UEM solutions are ripe for conquering whatever remaining market is left there, and VMware is surely spearheading the charge with AirWatch (market-dominant) and the new WorkSpace ONE (watch the cool 7-min demo here). I am personally really sold on this story and here’s why:

Desktop OSes (Win10 1709+ and MacOS High Sierra+) can be managed with EMM just like the mobile devices, and both MS and Apple seem to take this direction seriously.

CE6 is dead and WEHH6.5 dies in less than two years. Given no other competition, everythin will be either iOS or Android, and none of those can be realistically deployed without MDM/EMM. And another weak spot for AirWatch that is going away soon.

Identity management and SSO have fully matured in the last few years, and are ripe to become standard, rather than “enhanced/advanced” functionality in the Enterprise infrastructure. And WorkSpace ONE (if you’ve seen the demo) has a unique value proposition here.

Being able to show off AutoCad on an iPad is cool! 🙂 But more importantly, being able to free the enterprise from the leash of legacy apps (must have IE6, Java5 etc etc etc) by delivering them virtualized even to mobile devices means that mobile first has to real reason not to happen.

Who else can combine the industry-leading EMM/UEM, identity management and virtualization into one package?

So, where else to be in the EMM world? 🙂

Or do you disagree? Let me know your thoughts here or on LinkedIn/Twitter!

AOSP was or still is the major [vendor] differentiator. With all these Android changes1) it will be almost no matter what devices will be engaged
2) the role of 3rd party EMMs will go down. Google will be everywhere.
Do you feel it as a positive news?

Before looking any further, please pause and consider, how do you feel about that? Now, read on!

Yours trully unexpectedly ended up talking at WLAN Professionals Conference Europe 2015 on a subject of IoT and Wi-Fi. I heard good feedback after the session, so you might be interesting in watching 16-min video yourselves. (Disclaimer: presentation on my own behalf and may not reflect the official position of my employer). If you find some context in my video unclear, you might want to view the video of David Coleman, as my talk was largely provoked by his presentation (the current state of IoT allows for more than one perspective on things). Let me know, what’s your perspective on this matter in comments!

BTW, it was my second time there (and a second ad-hoc talk) at WLPC EU, and I absolutely enjoy it. If you reside in Europe and you are into Wi-Fi, you want to be there next time! There were many interesting sessions at the conference, you can view all the recordings here: https://vimeo.com/keithrparsons/videos

Ever been annoyed by those password policies that say “One digit, one uppercase, one lowercase” and then cap your password at, say 12 characters? Are those passwords secure these days, when cheap processing power is freely available ? A while ago I’ve stumbled upon an articlewhere, among other info, some really interesting data was shared about how long it takes to crack standard crypto hashes used for password encryption in WLANs, web sites and operating systems. This prompted for a refresher in password security and brute-forcing performance. The numbers are worth sharing.